When the accumulation of wealth
is no longer of high social importance,
there will be great changes in the code of morals.
We shall be able to rid ourselves
of many of the pseudo-moral principles
which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years,
by which we have exalted
some of the most distasteful of human qualities
into the position of the highest virtues.
We shall be able to afford
to dare to assess the money-motive
at its true value.
The love of money as a possession —
as distinguished from the love of money
as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life —
will be recognized for what it is,
a somewhat disgusting morbidity,
one of those semi-criminal,
semi-pathological propensities
which one hands over with a shudder
to the specialists in mental disease.
But beware!
The time for all this is not yet.
For at least another hundred years
we must pretend to ourselves
and to everyone
that fair is foul
and foul is fair;
for foul is useful and fair is not.
Avarice and usury and precaution
must be our gods for a little longer still.
For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
John Maynard Keynes (1931)
